


corporate ethics (re: basement clones)

by watername



Category: SHINee
Genre: Evil Twins, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-19 07:53:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22874293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watername/pseuds/watername
Summary: "So, long story short. There was a basement room full of a bodiless, ancient entity. I kind of woke it up during debut promotions, and it latched onto me and used me as a baseline to make human forms - " Taemin gestures at the shapeshifter, which seems to be flipping through eye colors and has temporarily settled on a cat-like yellow. "Ta-da.""Bullshit," Minho breathes.how to use an ageless, shapeless, noncorporeal being to overthrow your corporate overlords
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20
Collections: Winter of SHINee





	corporate ethics (re: basement clones)

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to the mods of summerofshinee, who graciously granted my request for an extension. 
> 
> thank you to eevee, for her last-minute affirmations.

“What am I doing?” is a typical refrain in SM Entertainment, especially for small and overwhelmed trainees.

“What do you think you're doing?” is what Lee Changyu (13, perpetually embarrassed) hears from the other trainees, their coaches, and trainers with crushing consistency.

"Where am I?" is what Changyu says to himself, once he realizes he has lost four of his peers.

In a fit of poor planning, and even poorer rebellion, the five of them had snuck late-night snacks into the worst music room, stuffing it and themselves full with twitchy energy. They had been laughing, mouths sloppy, up until the point Woohee's phone lit up with a warning text from a sympathetic senior. One of the managers had found them out.

He's fairly certain he took a shoe to the face, in the ensuing panic. Touching his nose cautiously as he makes his way down the hallway, Changyu finds the smallest bit of blood. He curses as much as he can bear to, without reflexively checking for adults.

While he's preoccupied, a door appears where there was none before.

This provokes the infrequent situation of a human noticing Practice Room 44.

When he notices the doorplate, Changyu starts. He didn’t even think there was such a place. He had, on his first day, red-faced and sweaty with excitement, taken a photo of a building map, determined not to lose his place or his chance.

What is odder yet, when he goes to his tiptoes –

(The tiptoes are a necessity. His mother had told him he still had time to grow, and he tries very hard to believe that despite all the evidence otherwise.)

(Even Minjun, who’s barely 12, passed him last week.)

\- is the people inside Practice Room 44: his seniors, Lee Jinki, Kim Jonghyun, Kim Kibum, and Choi Minho.

He slips on the floor, scrabbling up to confirm what he saw. All four of them were supposed to be in the military, and it defied reason that they were all on the leave at the same time, not to mention having secret meetings in secret practice rooms late at night. Unless they were also sneaking food and drinks, which Changyu thinks would make them his heroes, and also make him a bit grimmer about the future. 

When he goes back up successfully, he sees some emphatic gestures, like they're having an argument about something serious, but he can't hear anything, not even through the glass that must be thinner than the door itself. He has an uncomfortably nauseous feeling in his stomach, a combination of the food gulped down, and the running, and now the possible violation of his seniors' privacy, but he thinks anyone would want to overhear this. It'd be weird if he wasn't curious. 

One of the group has his back to him, and he thinks it must be Jonghyun, because it's the smallest figure in the loose circle, and his hand comes back to scratch at the back of his neck, nails colored black. Changyu dimly processes that the entire group is dressed like they're promoting something with implications he doesn't quite understand.

(Changyu still shies away from the concept of eyeliner, terrified it will poke his eyes out. Changyu isn't the best at naming fashion concepts, much less those that include strategic cropping, exposed muscle lines, and mesh.)

The hand moves back, it sweeps to the side, and Jonghyun is turning his body, but this all becomes quite a null point. His view is very suddenly, very much occupied by Lee Taemin instead.

“Grk,” says Changyu, who had a prolific case of “what do I do with my elbows?” when he passed Taemin seven months ago and still has awkward sweaty nightmares about it sometimes.

Taemin is staring at him through the window, his eyeline slanting down when Changyu drops back off his tiptoes. But Taemin is also on tour in America at the moment.

He fumbles in his pocket and pulls out his phone.

_lm_____ltm: new York!!_

_Posted 30 minutes ago_

Changyu looks back up. Taemin is wearing a knowing smirk that’s been documented so many times by fansites but they never really capture how overwhelming it is in real life.

 _Maybe there’s an event or something_ , he thinks, rapidly spinning on his heels.

 _Maybe I’m seeing things and need to sleep_.

 _Maybe Sangkyung is right and there are aliens and this whole label business is really just a war over territory and they’re fighting it out with possessed bodies and shinee is really just a front and they can’t have their most potent forces out fighting for the human enemy and and and_ –

Lee Changyu (13, paranoid) doesn’t sleep very well that night, and he unfollows Taemin on Instagram just to make sure he’s not exposed to alien-until-confirmed-otherwise propaganda.

This is, as they say, too little, too late.

* * *

An abbreviated summary of Practice Room 44.

  * it permeated into existence on July 17, 2008
  * its first human found it on August 10, 2014
  * it's cold
  * it has been lived in for 5 years, 4 months, when a skittish, fevered 13-year old finds it and decisively concludes (incorrectly) aliens are real.



* * *

A solo debut is supposed to be exhausting. Taemin can admit he's going to succumb to it at some point, but not any time soon.

His nerves are tightwire, thrumming away through the days and nights leading up to it. It's like a half-step up from their group debut, made sharp with the fact he has no one to commiserate with him. He's several years older now, but it's the same kind of promise, raw with potential. They all could look at it after the debuting was over, and say it was good, just as much as it was unsustainable. When he has a moment to breathe, Taemin can recognize it. Tired will come after. He can only hope it'll come with sleep.

The excitement and energy, covering up nerves, is understandable. The rest of SHINee can collectively agree.

They also collectively agree their youngest is near unbearable in close quarters. Even Jinki occasionally looks perturbed.

Because of this, because he's a nice person - and because Kibum threw a towel over his own face and screamed into it, face mask be damned – Taemin is taking all his feelings out on a walk, exploring the bowels of the building. Random doors get opened. Dark places that have little to recommend it, get a restless 21-year old poking around.

Restlessly and recklessly curious is a bad combination, all things considered.

He’s swinging his arms out, humming, when one extension is miscalculated and his knuckles rap against the sharp edge of a metal shelf. Taemin, who left a dorm room full of Minho’s cheering invectives for him to get out and stop fucking around while Jinki was trying to sleep, swears enough to make him proud.

There’s even a small little smear of blood over an otherwise-white knuckle.

(It would be nice to pretend a more focused Taemin, who wasn’t running off of minimal sleep and maximum caffeine, would have noticed a door materializing out of nowhere. He is, after all, some 8 years older than Changyu would be when he’s the unlucky person to find it next. He has a bit more experience, a bit less panic skittering his senses askew.)

(It would be nice, but let’s be honest.)

Practice Room 44 shudders itself into accessibility. When Taemin’s palm brushes against the arctic cold of its door handle, he doesn’t think to himself any of the following, extremely reasonable items:

  * weird
  * very weird
  * this makes no architectural sense, with that hallway



He thinks to himself instead –

  * neat, new room



– and turns the door handle.

* * *

Practice Room 44 has an inhabitant. It is a _thing_.

It has no concept of self. To have this, it would need to recognize something else as _else_ : separate, not of itself.

Up until the point where the door is opened, it simply _is_ , without disturbance, without growth. The act of being is the act of waiting. 

Awareness comes to it abruptly. The _else_ is there, the _else_ is recognized. The _else_ changes the _thing_ by its mere presence. 

**Human**. 

It was like a car, running through some fog, and sending it scurrying into a thousand different patterns quite distinct from what it was before. Still fog, yes – but with tracks of something else. The _thing_ examines the unwary human solidity carefully, and unseen.

 **Human.** It exudes curiosity and fixation and energy and vibrancy.

The _thing_ learns how to love, and loves it immediately. If it had legs, it would scurry up and across its so planes and curves and angles – and, oh, it’s _warm_ , and this too is new, this too defines the _thing_ as cold. 

It swirls, invisible, around one piece of the human, and then the next, and then the next, on and on. It has so many parts, all in different places, near separates themselves, but the _thing_ is around all of it. If only the human could see it, could step outside of its solidity and perceives the _thing’s_ existence. It would see itself completely enveloped.

The _thing_ soaks in everything about this solid, warm human, skims just the fat at the top of the boiling pot of its thoughts and sensations.

_slick and obsessive and focused and whirling wings of motion, fluttering! – appealing and dangerous and profitable and fantasy –_

There's a sudden disruption, distorting the collection, and the human twists out of its own thoughts and pivots. There's brightness, curiosity, and its thoughts are full of others, more separations, more **humans.**

And now the _thing_ knows that humans are multiple.

It's a transgression, and the _thing_ gleans all it can, in one fell swoop. And it loves, again, four more times.

The _thing_ lifts off the human and lets it go.

It considers, for the first time, if a _thing_ can become _things_.

* * *

Taemin texts Jonghyun back, the space between the nape of his neck, and the spade of his shoulders, buzzing with alien energy.

If he could bother to check the time, it’s been 45 minutes since he struck his hand and drew blood. His memories are of walking in, and abruptly walking out. There is nothing else of note. 

Certainly not a colorless ephemera plucking pieces of his self out and twisting it around for its own purposes.

He forgets entirely about Practice Room 44.

* * *

“What the fuck, Taemin!” doesn’t get said for another 5 hours - not in the same building, nowhere near the relevant topic - but it’s an appropriate coda for this piece of the story.

* * *

Several years ( - or, several months) - 

“No, I am _serious_ ,” a slightly less young Lee Changyu says. He is, with increasing insensibility, trying to express what he saw seven months ago. Unfortunately, his audience is a scoffing Woohee. He is certain he's the one who kicked him in the face and therefore has no right to act so above the whole mess he really got Changyu into.

“All of them, even Taemin, and he was on tour. You can't explain that.”

“No way,” Woohee says.

Changyu hates him, on principle, for a lot of things. He hates him a little more when he follows up with, “I cannot believe you got drunk without us!”

“I did not,” he fumes, going red at his eartips.

Woohee grins. It's jackal-like and confident in that way he’s been practicing in the mirror every night.

“OK, then show me. Show me the _mysterious room of mysteries_.”

“Fuck you,” Changyu says, but he stabs at the down button to the elevator regardless. Everyone else is preoccupied at the moment, and Changyu had done his best to forget everything, but he knows that Kibum will be getting released from the military just next month, and he saw Jonghyun in the cafeteria the other week.

He’s backed away from the _aliens!!_ theory that Sangkyung is so attached to, but seeing them in-person had made it just more difficult to forget. He knows what he saw.

Running into Jinki coming out of one of the vocal practice rooms earlier this very day made him do two things:

  * cover up an instinct squeak of dismay
  * resign himself to discovering The Truth.



Changyu hates the truth. Just about as much as he hates his current company. But Woohee is the one who was with him, and who heard him squeak, so then they had to eat dinner together and discuss why squeaking _wasn’t_ him being an embarrassing fanboy, it was his survival instinct.

“They're probably just fucking with you,” Woohee says as the elevator doors open. "They probably rotate it around all the groups to weed out all the bad trainees.”

“Shut up," he snaps. He pushes his fingers up to Woohee's lips and zippers them across. 

Woohee makes a dumb noise – all of his noises are objectively dumb – but follows obediently.

Changyu tries to remember where everything was that night. The best place to start would be the music room they all started in, which he thinks was number 5. He runs back over the memories of that night, all the way back to when his biggest worry was getting drummed out of the company, and not inexplicable, definitely nefarious doubles.

He's so preoccupied that when the door opens, he walks straight into one very solid chest.

Woohee squeaks now, but he can't take satisfaction in it. He's trying to remember breathing or something like it, because the chest he ran into is partially exposed, like they're filming something, and, more importantly, _cold_ , and in a way that's bigger and deeper than this basement, like it's never even known warmth or heat or blood.

It also feels just as cold as the hands that are efficiently disentangling him and the chest. 

Changyu’s eyes are squeezed shut for as long he can manage, to hang onto the hope that these are not who he thinks they are, that it's just one of the kindlier managers scolding them for being out at 10PM, and she just happened to be handling big iceblocks for some very reasonable purpose.

It's nice. Woohee’s dumb voice starts speaking and ruins it.

“Seniors – we’re so sorry, we’ll just be going right now. Good luck on all of your - err - surreptitious basement activities.”

“Wait,” and now he has to open his eyes, because that’s –

Choi Minho circles around, and he looks disappointed in them. This is by far the worst feeling, worse than the time he discovered violently that he was allergic to bees on a school picnic.

Behind him are Jinki and Jonghyun, who have both been released from the military - but the hair is all wrong, dangerous streaks of red for Jinki, whose hair was still dark brown this morning, and jet-black for Jonghyun, who had dyed his hair platinum blond practically one step off the military bus.

Minho definitely, conclusively, hasn’t been released from the military, certainly not long enough to grow his hair out, long enough to dust his collarbone.

He can almost feel Woohee doing the rapid recalculations in his head. _Serves him right_ , he thinks viciously, as the fake Minho examines the two of them.

“You’re the one who saw us earlier this year,” he finally says, slow and thoughtful.

Changyu’s never exactly shat himself before, but he sees the appeal now.

“I think it’s best if you leave.”

“What if we don’t?” Woohee says – stupid, _stupid_ , now he’s going to die because he happened to share a vocal range with an idiot – and fake Minho, who looks like he’s stepped out of a CF about alcohol and hairspray, just kind of tilts his head and then the Jinki behind him laughs, and steps forward with a bright smile that makes Changyu think briefly that he's the real Lee Jinki, ignoring the fact that the real Jinki has been happily dwelling in oversized sweaters for several months and has never been the type to voluntarily wear anything tight or defined, especially on his off time –

“Do you want to find out?”

Changyu grabs Woohee’s head and shakes it from side to side, before the other boy can do anything.

“No, we’re fine, thank you – thank you for your time and - um - best of luck on - things.”

* * *

The _thing_ is five, and now it calls itself five different names: Lee Jinki, Kim Jonghyun, Kim Kibum, Choi Minho, and Lee Taemin.

It likes these names. Its origin is beyond the understanding of the nameholders, yet somehow it's grown into these names, fleshed them out based on a whisper of knowledge. It's filled in all the soft grayness with hard lines of finality. It is not quite right, but it's - close enough. It's not devoid of commonalities.

With the smallest whisper of knowledge, of the briefest exposure, the _thing_ was sustained, invigorated. It managed to stretch out, bit by bit, beyond the confines of its space. Wisps of it tendrilled throughout the building, for moments here, and then minutes, and then hours, as its strength grew from learning more.

It even saw its **human** , and followed at his heels, like a loyal pet.

It learned how to listen. It learned how to talk. The second - far more difficult than the first.

Talking, it seemed, was what humans did most. It didn’t have meaning, and it did. Sometimes it was precise and sharp, like solid beating against solid. Other times it was gliding and smooth and it reminded the _thing_ of the freedom of formlessness. 

When it listened for the name, it heard - _singing._ And it loved singing.

Some tendrils would whisper into rooms devoted just for singing, for the pleasure of listening, and it would twist around itself, noise crescendoing on noise, smoothing over into something melodic and beautiful and somehow, it was the feeling of moonlight, of crisp serenity. 

(And when this one chose a name - _Jonghyun_.)

There was a lot of talking, the further up and up. Careful talking, with careful words, that another _thing_ didn’t like very much at all. But not liking something, it decided, didn’t mean it should be avoided. How else would it be known, and destroyed?

(So this one listened more than talked, too, and it chose - _Jinki_.)

When the moon was high and full and unseen outside, these two had seen the ones they were named after, their softness, and they said – _they are weak; we will not be, so they can._ They opted for kindness over cruelty, in their likeness, in their own way.

The others followed, soon after, with their own preferred places, their own preferred lessons: this one was _Kibum_ , and it seemed to have a keen eye for everything, everywhere. As far as it could reach, it wanted to be.

And this one, _Minho_ , and it too wanted to be everywhere, and it wanted to know everyone.

And _Taemin_.

Well - here the lines, less gray. And the exposure, longer. The similarities were unnerving. The differences were deliberate. 

* * *

“That was – “

“Exactly what I said it was!” Changyu hisses at Woohee as they huddle protectively into the elevator and wait for it to close. The fake Jonghyun tosses them a soft handwave goodbye that seems laden with doom. “I _told you, you stupid_ – “

Woohee cuts him short, and very calmly says: “I wonder when they clone us.”

Changyu can only stare as he continues. His brain has crashed to a dead-stop.

“Anything else is silly. People can’t be in two places at once, and it’s not like they’re – " Woohee's eyes narrow in conviction. "There’s no such thing as evil doubles or something like that. Cloning is a science. Clearly far more developed than previously thought.”

Changyu would come up with some cutting response, he would, but the elevator is travelling up again. When it opens up to the lobby, they are greeted with a clearly tired Lee Taemin.

The world is entirely too small and mean-spirited. Changyu works in the same building as his seniors, and he’s seen the real – not alien, not demonic – Taemin all of once. But now that he’s on the run from a set of most likely evil SHINee doubles - literally the first person he sees.

“Good evening, sunbaenim,” Woohee says calmly, and Taemin greets them back, cordial but preoccupied, most likely on his way somewhere that’s else, but Changyu just can’t stop the word vomit that's creeping up his throat, he _can’t_ –

“Your members are in the basement.”

Taemin stops and looks at Changyu curiously, like he’s some kind of bug, and he, honestly, is feeling a little bug-like. Maybe he’ll pull out a giant magnifying glass and put him out of his misery.

“Oh?” he says. It’s entirely too flat for Changyu’s taste. Worse yet, Woohee’s starting to open his mouth and he can’t let Woohee start talking about clones in front of Lee Taemin.

“Not your real members. They’re, um….different.”

“The prevalent theory is clones," Woohee chimes in, undeterred by common sense.

“The basement?” Taemin asks, considerably less flat, and, Changyu thinks, more enthusiastically than fits the situation. If the fake SHINee is evil, then maybe the real Taemin is their insider and is the phalanx of the whole operation, slowly taking SM down from the inside. Changyu nods mutely, though, because he has yet to develop a sense of self-preservation that operates effectively while rebelling against authority.

Taemin stabs at the button for the basement.

“Sunbaenim…weren’t you going somewhere?” he says cautiously.

“Yes, but I think it can wait," Taemin says, with a sly smile on his face. It looks exactly like the same smirk the fake Taemin gave him when Changyu first spotted them.

There’s really nothing he can even say to that, but Woohee suddenly seems much more chipper, and his phone is buzzing anyway.

_AWFUL: hes in on it_

_AWFUL: he might even be one of them_

_changyuuuuu: its UR FAULT if we die_

_changyuuuu: u didnt have to say anything_

_AWFUL: stop panicking_

_AWFUL: he culd have killed u the 1 st time rmbr_

It’s infuriatingly reasonable. When the doors pop open, Taemin steps out brightly and turns towards them and gestures like they’re doing an interview together.

“Where were they?”

“Mu – music room 5,” Changyu responds in a whisper, hoping that Taemin will pick up on his obvious fear. But his sunbaenim is either really oblivious or malicious – _why not both? –_ and just nods decisively and heads off in that direction.

The two of them trail in his wake. After a few minutes of walking, he turns around and stops them both in their tracks.

“Did they say anything to you?”

“They, um. Minho – Minho sunbaenim – scolded us.”

Taemin laughs, abrupt and sharp.

“Minho, and – Jinki?”

“Yes, and Kim Jonghyun.”

“Okay,” he says, and cups his hands around his mouth, and shouts without warning. “SHINee! Calling for shining SHINee! Minus Kim Kibum!”

A whisper of cold brushes against Changyu’s ankles.

* * *

Their **human** was back.

It collected itself back together from insubstantiality, re-found that place that let it be corporeal, let it have _bodies_ just like their equivalents, slicked over with all the things it had learned and gathered. One of them, always the quickest, always the sharpest, was first.

* * *

"I said 'minus Kim Kibum'," Taemin says when the figure walks out at them, and this not-Kibum may be the worst one of all to Changyu's informed opinion. He doesn't seem that different at all from the real Kim Kibum, except he's scarier. 

His gaze sweeps over the two of them briefly, and Changyu makes a minor correction - this one is a _lot_ scarier. His senior is a little aloof sometimes and Changyu's uncomfortable around him, but he's uncomfortable around almost everyone, but Kibum has always been softened by his members and his friends. It's all just supposed to be a stage persona. Their managers mention that sometimes, about changing little pieces of yourself to make something else entirely, and the longer you're in the industry, the more it seems like it's just a part of you that you unpack and put away as needed, like muscle memory.

Changyu thought he got it before, but looking at someone - someone _s_ , because the other members of fake SHINee are coming out now, too - and not being able to see even the little bits that make them a person you can meet in a hallway, or a conference room, and this person-shaped thing isn't a person at all, just assuming the form.

It feels very, very cold. 

"Look," Woohee hisses at him, and Taemin's looking at the fake Taemin, their faces held close enough together to kiss. "It's ' _Press It_ '".

Changyu doesn't think he has it in him to even respond to that - he has goosepimples running up and down his arms, and no amount of frantic rubbing will make them go away. The fake Jonghyun is looking at him, and it's like he never even heard of the word 'military'. The real Jonghyun is still growing his hair out. The real Jonghyun just posted a video of him taking Roo for a walk. His hair, inky and dark, falls across his eyes when he smiles slightly. When he speaks, shockingly soft and light, it's just like they are tuning into Blue Night.

"You've come back," his words are small and quietly delighted, and Taemin smiles at him like he's the real Jonghyun, and not some undefined evil entity. 

Maybe _Taemin_ was the real undefined evil entity, and Woohee was onto something for once in his life.

"I never left," he responds and gestures to the fake Taemin, who's hanging onto the fake Jinki like they're magnetized together. Fake Taemin corrects him almost instantly.

" _We_ left. That's why we're like this, now," he lazily casts one arm out to include the whole group of them, from fake Kibum, who's moved closer to Changyu and Woohee like a curious world-ending asteroid, to fake Minho, who's getting repeatedly poked at by the real Taemin (who Changyu has now conclusively decided is psychotic), to fake Jonghyun, tipping to the side to brush his hair out between long, elegant fingers, unhurried, and lastly to fake Jinki, who looks completely composed and content with fake Taemin ending his gesture by wrapping his hand around his elder's waist.

The fact that all their gestures, all their behaviors, are mirrors of things Changyu has seen in their promos, only makes him more queasy. 

"We found what we liked."

"Exposure concepts?" real Taemin responds, having moved onto actively lifting up the fake Minho's already thin shirt to examine his stomach. 

"No," the fake Jinki finally interjects, his voice low and intent. "Not everything. There are some who want to hurt you, and the others. You're - " his nose wrinkles, like he's smelled a rotting fish. "Just meat to them."

Taemin shrugs. 

"What can you do about it? Kill them?"

"Yeah."

"Oh," Taemin says, apparently unruffled by his fake equivalent's admission. "When?"

"Tomorrow," fake Kibum says, clearly wanting to get to the point. "We don't like them."

The rest of fake SHINee nods, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Fake Jonghyun, in particular, looks displeased about it, but he is exchanging glances with fake Jinki, loaded with some commentary Changyu can't decipher. 

"You can't just kill people!" Changyu says, his voice cracking exactly when it would the least helpful to his case. "They're - they're people!"

"They're worsening this place," fake Jinki says to him, and it seems only to him. "We'll remove them, and your lives will be better. We're not taking pleasure about this."

"He definitely is," Woohee murmurs, tipping his chin at fake Taemin, who makes a "eh, you got me" face. 

"But there's worse people!"

"I mean," Taemin says, thoughtful. "Not in this building, though. Are these the only people you're interested in murdering? Can you go outside this building?" 

At Changyu's disgusted noise, Taemin turns to him. 

"The Punisher," he says, like that explains anything.

"Not yet," fake Minho answers. "We can get around to the worse people later."

"Fair enough."

"Not fair!" Changyu yelps. 

"I mean, it's not a bad plan," Woohee stage-whispers to him. "If they're noncorporeal, no one will even know it was them. Imagine how fucked we'd all be if SHINee went to jail for being serial killers."

"The second scared child gets it," fake Kibum interjects. "There's no danger to anyone else."

"But it's wrong!"

Fake Jinki pushes the fake Taemin away from him, and walks towards Changyu, who finds himself backing up until there's a convenient wall to support him, because his legs are refusing to do so. The real Jinki is kind, and quiet, and patient in a way that everyone else praises. He doesn't think this one has those traits. 

He braces himself to be murdered in the face. 

"Look at me," he hears the quiet command, and squeezes one eye open. The fake Jinki doesn't look like he's about to murder him, but he looks sad, and resigned. 

"You are very, very young, aren't you?"

"He's 13," Woohee says.

" _Thirteen and_ _a half_ ," Changyu says, unwilling to die with that inaccuracy gone uncorrected. 

"We don't have an age," fake Jinki says. "We have never been young, or old. But we know things that you do not know, and how humans hurt each other, even the ones they say they care for. We do not want you to know that. We will stop it from happening to you for the first time." His eyes flicker to the side, to where real Taemin is standing behind him. "We will stop it from happening for the twentieth time."

"But - " Changyu starts to say. Fake Jinki's eyes feel like a weight against his chest, a stone blocking his throat from more words. "But - "

"It'll always happen, hyung," real Taemin says, his voice finally without that tone of amusement. "There'll be a person tomorrow to replace the person you killed, today, and they'll be the same, or worse. It's just the way it is."

"So we'll kill them too," the fake Taemin says.

"Do you have any solution besides murder?" Changyu snaps. 

"Not really." 

Woohee speaks suddenly from Changyu's side. 

"You could sue them. Or, like - make your own."

Fake Jinki blinks. 

"Sue?"

Woohee shrugs and continues on, like he's not giving legal advice to a group of aliens/demons/clones/etc.

"Yeah, take them to court. I guess people just throw money around to get the good lawyers - "

Fake Kibum twists his fingers around, and a wad of yellow paper appears in his fist. Woohee nods emphatically. 

"See? People sue all the time and they lose, and then they run out of money, but you can just _keep making money_ , and my dad says money solves everything."

"But if they sue, then that's bad press. Right?" Changyu looks uncertainly at the real Taemin, who can probably confirm this kind of thing. He wishes a different member of the real SHINee was here to answer important adult questions. "And they won't be able to do shows or release videos or anything. That's what they did to Jes - _you know_."

"Right," the fake Taemin comes over to join the little discussion. "So murder it is."

"If there's another option - " the fake Jonghyun says, and with that fake Jinki seems to rethink the entire thing, straightening back up and wandering back, engaging in a hushed conversation. Changyu thinks it's a good sign - he really, really doesn't want to be associated with conspiring to kill half of SME, even if it is the ones who talk about all the trainees like they're just things. 

What would be best, Changyu thinks very hard, is if they could just replace that half with people who actually care, without getting sued, or blocked from promoting, or anyone getting murdered by some spirit entity. 

"Can't you just take over?" he murmurs to himself.

Fake Kibum, who had been half-listening to the fake elders converse, hears him - he has the aesthetics and hearing of a bat, apparently - and asks him to repeat it: "Louder."

"Um - can't you - because you're just - I mean - you're not _human -_ you can change how you look and everything - and you can make money - can't you just - pretend to be other people, replace the bad people and then just run this company like you want?"

There is a resounding silence, and then there isn't.

"Taemin suits me best."

"I am pretty great."

"Wow, that's pretty smart, Changyu."

"Who could we become?"

"Anyone."

"But again - I like being - "

"We know," the fake Jinki says to the increasingly annoyed looking fake Taemin. He looks uncomfortable for a moment, and then corrects himself, for the first time speaking for himself and himself alone. " _I_ know."

"They don't live long. We don't die," fake Kibum says. "We'll have to keep changing."

"That's not a problem," fake Jonghyun says, and his face twitches, becomes slightly less _Jonghyun_ , and more someone who might get mistaken for Jonghyun by an excited and inebriated fan. 

"See?" Taemin says brightly. "Solutions everywhere."

The fake Taemin has a displeased look on his face, but the other fake members seem to be taking to the idea, and Changyu breathes a sigh of relief. Woohee even gives him a quick nudge of the shoulder that he reciprocates, exchanging self-satisfied grins. 

"So - " Woohee starts. "What happens now?"

* * *

By the time he gets discharged out of the military, Minho's jumped out of planes, participated in shooting exercises, gone on survival training, et al. They've all been fun. It's when he gets discharged, and Taemin draws him off to the side after all the requisite hugs and pleasantries have been exchanged, and warns him about something he's working on at the company, now, that he has some nausea. 

"It's good," Taemin swears, up and down. "For everyone. _Promise_."

Minho wants to trust him, but his absolute refusal to give him any more information until all five of them are back under SME's roof is unnerving, to say the least.

So he does his best to eat with his friends and family, and not worry himself too much over their youngest member. Taemin survived fine while they were all in the military, and he knew better than what most would give him credit for. He'd been happy and proud to see glimpses of it during phone calls, over public posts when he could. It was _fine_. No way could it be nearly as bad as his paranoia was making it out to be.

When he walks into the office with a nameplate he doesn't recognize - _Lee Youngjin, Creative Director_ \- on Taemin's direction, he thinks maybe there's a surprise about their next comeback, which gets validated when he sees Kibum, hair dyed an eclectic mix of purple and red, lounging at one of the chairs. Taemin is standing near the window, facing them.

"Kibum!" he exclaims and drapes himself over his back in a hug, his bare cheek pressing against his friend's weirdly cold neck.

"Eh," Taemin says. "Not really."

Minho ignores it, because that's definitely Kibum - although now that he has a moment to think about it, he was under the impression Kibum was preoccupied today about a possible drama opportunity. 

"Where's Jonghyun and Jinki?" he asks instead, looking at his phone as he takes a seat and checking their group chat. 

There's a weird, almost slithering noise, that has him looking up sharply, and out of the corner of his eyes - Kibum is _shifting_ , his hair going a chestnut brown, his nostrils flaring out slightly more, eyebrows thickening, cheekbones widening and the jaw following suit, and the pink of his lips jutting out like - 

"....fuck, Taemin," Minho breathes, because _Jinki_ is looking back at him where he was _Kibum_ just a moment ago, and Taemin is grinning like a cat with a mouthful of canary. "What the cockbreathing shit?"

"Great, right?" Taemin says, and Jinki - Kibum - still isn't saying anything, but his lips curl in a way Jinki doesn't, unless carefully prompted, and then his eyes start changing, like blinds descending down a window, and now he - it - is Jonghyun.

"So, long story short," Taemin starts. Minho is back-calculating the last time he drank. "There was a basement room full of a bodiless, ancient entity. I kind of woke it up during debut promotions, and it latched onto me and used me as a baseline to make human forms, and because I was there for a while, they got a sense of each of you too, and it had been killing time exploring the building and getting to know everybody, which means they know _us_ but it also means they got to know all the assholes, and turns out it's pretty protective. It actually wanted to murder a bunch of people for our protection, but some of the trainees and me managed to stop it a couple months ago by giving them jobs. So - " he gestures at the shapeshifter, which seems to be flipping through eye colors and has temporarily settled on a cat-like yellow. "Ta-da."

"Bullshit," Minho breathes. Taemin shakes his head in disappointment.

"No, it's _great_. No murder, all profit."

"Taemin, you don't even know what this thing _is_ ," he protests. His brain is skipping over the part where Taemin involved a couple of hapless trainees. He gets up and starts pacing, keeping one eye on the other being in the room. It looks bored at his panic.

"Sure I do. It's creative director, Lee Youngjin."

"Formerly known as Lee Taemin," the being says, and its eyes flip in shape and color and then the rest of it follows, like origami unfolding, until there's a set of perfect twins both staring at him like Minho's the crazy one.

"See?"

"No!"

"Do you know who used to be in this office?" the fake Taemin says. Minho shuts his mouth with a snap, remembers a man who would stare, and stare, and make comments about hidden cameras no one found funny, but still got nervous laughs. 

"See?" Taemin asks again. 

"Yeah," Minho says. He fists and opens his hand. "It's still batshit insane."

"I mean - _maybe_ ," Taemin concedes in his best "appease the hyungs" voice. "But again - asshole is still out there, still being alive." 

"And again - " the fake Taemin says. His own tone of voice says this is a longstanding argument that he's never quite going to let go of. "We'd be really, really good at killing him."

" **No** ," Minho and the real Taemin say in unison. 

There's a moment of silence, and Minho takes in a deep breath.

"I don't suppose being bodiless and in the basement is still an option."

"We want to help," the fake Taemin says petulantly. "Either you let us help, or we do it our way."

Well, when they put it like that - 

* * *

Taemin could have mentioned that he had done something similar to the others, except all the others got their own doubles to explain things to them.

Apparently, the fake Taemin is the only one that needs additional supervision.

Minho is still baffled why he had to be the one to go through the double-Taemin treatment. If anything, he thinks Jinki was the best one to take that one on, but Taemin refuses to explain his logic. At this point, though, with juggling the knowledge of non-human entities staging a generational coup at his job, for the express purpose of improving working conditions, along with everything else, it seems like the least of their problems. 

He takes a deep drink of his water and sighs, handing it off to his own double, who takes it with a nod of thanks. 

"So, who are you going to be?" he asks. Jinki's double is off with the lawyers; Jonghyun's, the vocal trainers; Kibum and Taemin's are probably fighting it out in creative direction. The general violent urges that had been denied them means that they're taking it out with their own divergent concepts for the rookie groups. Last he heard, NCT was taking bets on if Kim Youngjin was going to poison Kim Kunwoo (the Kibum double's alias), or if Kunwoo was going to throttle him first.

Minho's double has been skipping through identities, chosen and discarded every few days. It might be giving the real Minho a minor identity crisis.

"I had an idea," he says, the tenor of his voice skipping slightly higher, like a slow walk up a hill. Minho turns to look. 

"What do you think?" she says. She's just an inch or two shorter than Minho now, her hair trimmed into a tight buzz along one side, the line of her neck exposed and tan. He thinks, panicking, that this should have been a Taemin problem, a Kibum problem, a Jonghyun problem.

His cock is proving itself an inveterate narcissist.

"Fuck," Minho says eloquently. 


End file.
